


Body and Blood

by ButterflyGhost



Category: due South
Genre: Gen, Suicide, Violence, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-24
Updated: 2012-03-24
Packaged: 2017-11-02 10:46:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 815
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/368136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ButterflyGhost/pseuds/ButterflyGhost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Painfully inspired by the Zombie Universe. Hope this doesn't hurt as much to read as it did to write.</p></blockquote>





	Body and Blood

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SLWalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/gifts), [kalijean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalijean/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The due South Zombie Radioplay](https://archiveofourown.org/works/142177) by [kalijean](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalijean/pseuds/kalijean), [SLWalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker). 



“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on us...”

The sinner's prayer... he had always thought it a little bit protestant, really, a bit nineteen seventies Jesus Freak. Pictured well meaning freshly scrubbed teens and twenty somethings in their tie dyed T-shirts handing out leaflets, eagerly trying to convert him from the evil papacy to the one true face of Christianity.

He tries to picture those eager children now. They'd be grown up with children of their own.

God help their children.

“This is my Body, given for you...”

He was bitten at eight o'clock this morning. She'd come to him crying, begging for confession, and he had been about to grant her absolution when the convulsions started. He knew better, even at the time... enough bulletins had gone out, 'don't touch the infected.'

She wasn't the infected. She was Sally Moffat, mother of two, grandmother of four, widowed, volunteer at the local hospice... and beyond even all those facts, more importantly... a soul, a bright and shining sun, somebody whom God had created before time began, to be an immortal, to walk with Him in eternity. She was not just a mess of meat and bones and disease.

And she was thrashing on his floor, and she was crying, and saying “sorry, sorry...” And when her teeth began to click he didn't even register it, he didn't even care. He lent over her, tried to hold her through the spasms, through the pain. And she lurched forwards, and her teeth tore through the cassock, and the flesh, and the muscle, right to the bone. And he didn't even scream at the time. He flinched back, and grabbed her by her throat, and threw her to the ground, and he didn't even scream.

He threw her to the ground, as though she wasn't an immortal after all, as though God didn't love her, hadn't died for her...

He tore her from him, blood spattering from his shoulder, and bits of tendril, bits of meat, bits of grizzle splashing to the floor, all of it, all of it, destroying everything he ever believed about himself, everything he had ever hoped to be, the difference he had hoped to make, smashing it all. He took her and he threw her to the ground.

As though... as though... as though she'd never mattered at all. As though God never even cared.

And he had been her priest.

And now he's sitting in the presbytery, the door locked, the filing cabinet against the door, and outside they're moaning and banging, and trying to get through. And he's sitting with the consecrated wafers, the consecrated wine, and there are maybe twenty wafers left to go... and he has to consume them all with due reverence, he can't just gobble them like ice cream, he can't just swig the Blood like it's cider. And he cannot, he absolutely cannot leave them to be desecrated, because the zombies... Good Lord, the zombies... they would trample it in the mud... the precious Body, the precious Blood.

Body and Blood, Christ incarnate.

And he is not worthy, he is not worthy to receive Him... not after he threw Sally Moffat to the ground. But he's the only one, the only one left who knows, who loves, who worships...

Oh Jesus.

He is on his knees, bleeding, the fever already spiking through him, his prayers jumbling in his mind as he tries to hold on... This is my Body, This my Blood... Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us...

And the last wafer is consumed. The last dreg of wine.

They're still outside the door, and he feels that his body is changing, that his hunger is changing, his thirst...

Suicide is a sin.

He's been told that, he's preached that, he's grieved that at the graves of the damned.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God...

He doesn't feel the tears on his face as he takes the gun from its drawer, loads the clip. Body and Blood... he can't let the fever destroy him, he can't allow it to desecrate his body and his blood. He can't become a living mockery, 'the devil's walking parody' of a holy thing, a deathless shell where once there was a man, a changeling where once an immortal stood.

He braces himself against the desk, to stop himself from stumbling. It presses against the backs of his thighs, and even that is precious. Even that is one more moment, one more grace that God has given him, the sensation of fear, the feel of the wood.

He grabs his left wrist in his right hand. He lifts the left hand, the gun hand. He stands, faces the door. The wood is cracking beneath the weight and the heft of them.

God forgive me, he thinks. 

God forgive me...

He puts the gun to his head, and fires.

**Author's Note:**

> Painfully inspired by the Zombie Universe. Hope this doesn't hurt as much to read as it did to write.


End file.
